I’d just started to develop an interest in pop music, and there were several songs in the UK top-thirty at the time that I liked. Finding myself with more money than usual one weekend, I spotted a compilation album-vinyl at the time-which had the top twenty hits on it. I was so happy to think that I could acquire all of these songs at one “incredibly low price”, equivalent to the price of just one of them if bought separately, that I shelled out all my cash for the record.

At home, the terrible truth dawned on me within four bars of the first song, and then was confirmed by the next: these were cover-versions of the original recordings, and pretty poor ones at that. I’d been duped into spending my money on something false. I think the album went in the garbage in short order. However, a very valuable lesson was learned.

Now, many years later, it sometimes seems that almost everything man-made is presented as something it isn’t: man-made fibers posing as wool, resin posing as wood, root beer without roots or beer, “family-size” meals which are barely big enough for two, ice cream without cream, leather shoes without leather, money made of paper holding no actual value, smokeless cigarettes, brick cladding, veneer, plastic metal…and the list goes on endlessly. It even extends to relationships, with two “Moms” or “Dads”, perhaps neither one really being Mom or Dad.

And the scariest thing is that we seem to have come to love that which is false. We spend our money on huge lotteries, refusing to consider that the odds are many millions-to-one against winning. Vast numbers of people check out of reality every day and engross themselves for hours in a computer game, while others spend their time in TV-land instead of working to make reality better for themselves and others.

“Stars” are created when someone is made to look and sound like they have talent and beauty when in real life they may be no more talented or beautiful than the average Jo or Jane on the street. A singer fakes a “great” voice which he’d never use in the shower and receives worship and adoration from his fans. A TV personality poses as a holy man while taking millions of dollars from his flock. A president is chosen and empowered by spending billions of dollars on a glitzy campaign (and both sides do it) backed by his admiring press which hopes to see him fulfill all its own pet schemes.

It’s my view that we’re so used to falseness that we don’t know what truth is anymore-another Orwellian fulfillment.

The atheist and the evolutionist try to shove the word “science” in our faces, hoping we’ll never even consider the possibility that it was God who made that science, that it was God who created the laws of nature so as to bring about a physical universe of order and design and beauty, or the fact that creationists were the founders of modern science. They refuse to acknowledge that “in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17), and instead concoct and develop a story which negates any reference to the Creator. It’s the epitome of falseness.

“There is no god”, they say. “Here’s why everything is so amazingly complex and orderly-it created itself!”.